Tag Archives: Earth

Since I missed updating last week, I’m going to dive into some updates to the rules for the Martian colony game that’s being slowly worked on.

Spent part of today rethinking my rules for Sands of Mars. There were some parts I liked and some that felt clunky. On the clunky side, there wasn’t the meshing I wanted when it came to playing become action. There was plenty of action, but I felt that it wasn’t as complete as it could be. Something about what we were doing and what our goals were didn’t quite get there. This, I felt, affected how much fun we had. Therefore, I went and looked at what streamlining could be done as I reviewed my notes from the playtests.

I felt that it’s been long enough since I first put things together that going back to the beginning and reviewing my thought process was the place to start.

Shelter can consist of additional items, namely stuff that makes the shelter nice to live in. we now have electronics, appliances, and furniture.

To translate into game terms: Devices needed to generate O2, and H2O, and provide an environment for living, and an environment for growing. humans on a colony are going to want to communicate with each other and with the earth; therefore additional items are needed. some sort of satellite communication gear and terrestrial system to do the same. And to run it all, power generation. Change this up, it can be nuke plants or solar panels. 1 Nuke plant == 5 Solar Panels <– That may change. will have to play with it some more.

[this is about as far as i got last time, feels incomplete]

Okay, so the premise is that the players control robots which go about building these things; shelters, o2 generators, H2O generators, communication gear. each of those are comprised of smaller components, namely mechanisms generated by nanofactories.

The players search the map for places to put these items (stable locations), places to get materials to build the mechanisms.

Collapse minerals and iron into a single field. That’s the ticket. Add the third type as Soil that has to be moved. A nanofactory will move it from current location, if it’s not Stable to a location that is. That takes a certain number of turns. Once moved (some token will have to be used here) then a Farm can be built.

Get rid of everything but the designated Radio spot. Collapse it down, make it simpler and easy to put on a sector.

Stable — supports one structure on it
Soil — martian surface that can be easily converted into a arable earth
Minable — There are raw minerals close enough or in the surface that make this an excellent location for planting a nanofactory to produce material
Bedrock — Supports two regular structures on it or one tall structure (E.G. satellite uplink, Nuke Plant, or Radio Tower)
Non — while the surface is stable enough to traverse regularly, there is insufficient support under the surface for building.
Unstable — Player makes die roll when traversing, 1-3 nothing happens, 4 & 5 loses 1 action this turn, 6 turn ends
—-
Players can plant a nanofactory on an unstable or non region if it has soil or minable, but that factory will be destroyed in X turns due to the instability of the ground. There might even be room for a card that will allow for the temporary or permanent stabilization of a sector but at the cost of production.

How long would this new game last? 1 turn == 1 month, 12 turns == 1 year.
Each robot gets 4 actions per turn. Actions are Move, Probe, Start Nanofactory, Start Building

Nanofactories and Buildings are done the same way, utilizing a machine colony that the robots have tucked away inside of them. Each turn, the robots can produce enough new colony material to divide it once — starting a new building or a new nanofactory.

Nanofactorys produce only one thing now — materials — therefore end goals have to be changed up. But more than that — Building require a certain amount of material PER TURN to complete. (More cards in the deck that alter/enhance/detract from this function of the game)

Make the Nuke plant optional and there we go. Materials have been reduced to a single resource, getting rid of something I felt was too complicated. Locations continue also be a resource, but this time, they’re generalized giving the players some freedom in planning but also giving me the ability to mess around with the game tiles and the distribution of usable sites across them. Some playtesting is needed now to see how well these ideas work and so I can get a feel for the number of items needed for a “win”.